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Wonderland

Wonderland
Originally uploaded by obliqueapproach

Old photo from Tibet that I just dug up and polished up.

I Hate Fools also Life

I was just browsing around and realized that I keep finding pictures that people call "Emotive Portraits." It seems to just be a picture of themselves with heavy photoshop filters or weird patterns drawn on themselves. It really conveys no emotion, and even the few that can convey a simple one like "Anger" is done several (read:nearly twenty) times with the same make up and filters. And then, I realized that perhaps I don't know what "Emotive Portraits" are actually supposed to be. So I decided to look it up. As it turns out, THERE IS NO DEFINITION FOR IT. Somebody made up the term when they took a picture of themselves being sad about themselves or some shit stuff that's happened to them and then decided that they wanted to add superfluous meaning to it, and called it a form of art. And now people think it's perfectly fine to literally take hundred of photos of themselves making the same facial expression and call themselves an accomplished photographer. It pisses me off makes me angry. They're a bunch of goddamn gosh-darn second-hander Peter Keatings.




In other news, this next paragraph is for Mr Seder Burns. Hey Seder. You know what, I believe your Day in the Life project is cursed or something. First my media card breaks and I had to go buy a new one. Then, the night before I was going to take pictures, I went out to take photos for the Chinese Association at an event, and my camera breaks down. The clasp that opens the shutter snapped. Fantastic. So I went out and bought a new camera (so this is secretly a good thing, because I've needed a new camera for a long time anyways). And now that I've finished everything and made that goddamn gosh-darn presentation, I go and check on it and all the slides are blank aside from my text. I love this assignment.

Day in the Weekend!

Second animoto video

Create your own video slideshow at animoto.com.

CD Quality

I don't know about anyone else, but before this assignment, I was vaguely aware of 3 audio file formats: MP3, WMA, and AAC. And as it turns out, all 3 of these formats are "lossy" compression formats, meaning that when I rip a CD into any of these file types, the song is compressed slightly, degrading the quality of said song. From this we get the cycle of people continuously ripping and burning CDs at increasingly low quality until eventually you might as well listen to radio noise.

So I looked into various audio file types, and discovered that there are many, many formats for sound. I was particularly interested in the uncompressed and "lossless" formats, where the file is compressed using a special algorithm that allows the full file to be reconstructed from the compressed format, giving the impression of 0% compression.

I took my old Linkin Park CD and ripped it into various formats at differing qualities (I chose Linkin Park because they have a wide variety of pitches, from deep bass to shrill treble).

The formats I listened to went as follows:

MP3: 16 kbps, 112kbps, and 320 kbps

WMA: 16 kbps, 112 kbps, and 320 kbps

AAC: 128 kbps, 320 kbps

Apple Lossless Encoder: Lossless

WMA Lossless: Lossless

AIFF: Uncompressed

WAV: Uncompressed

It was fun listening to the progressively increasing quality. The 16 kbps was really shitty poor quality, and I could hear static and scratching in the background. My headphones sounded like it was getting molested during the loud parts, and it was overall a pretty sub-par experience.

The other qualities sounded much better, and the scratching went away, but my headphones still shook at the loud parts and seemed to be very upset with me.

Then I decided to try the lossless and uncompressed. Fuck yeah! It was much better. In fact the 16 kbps was me riding a donkey on a muddy slope with poisonous daggers and flaming rocks falling on me from above, and the lossless and uncompressed was like me driving a Bugatti Veyron at 253 mph down the smoothest road in the world that happened to have no cars while the wind blew in the same direction I was going and a rainbow was off the distance and leprechauns are real. Maybe someone could make the distinction, but I sure as hell definitely couldn't tell the difference between lossless and uncompressed.